


Moral Narcissism

by smokesmokesmoke



Category: No Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Free Verse, Poetry, small angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-10
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:00:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27424615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smokesmokesmoke/pseuds/smokesmokesmoke
Summary: Poems in honour of my mother, who never did quite master the art of loving me.—Spit stains cling to the mirror and the rain that rinses away the sins of others polishes hers into pearls.
Kudos: 1





	1. Texas Spring, Photographed

_Texas Spring, Photographed_

I

The numbers one and three  
but two was not enough.  
Irreducibles, water to glass to bone.  
Bend but did not break, cut to the quick.  
Egg without twin, fate without gorgeous.  
Make it quick.  
Entropy studies me the way I study  
you.

II

In love  
with spring. White blossoms cupping your laughter,  
the baby. Sun  
over your head, asphalt under your feet  
warming, a warning.  
Were you  
twenty-eight yet?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was born in Texas. I don't remember it at all. I do remember a photograph of me and my mother, standing under a tree. It may or may not have been spring. I like to think it was. But what I do know is - my mother was beautiful, then.
> 
> A small post-script for newcomers - if you decide to proceed in your exploration of my work, I hope you'll enjoy it, or at least be intrigued by it. Few are as esoteric as this opening one, and not all of them are, actually, about my mother. Mostly, this is poetry about dysfunction in relationships.


	2. July

__

_July_

Blood breaks in the bath, wave reduced  
to a shy finger in lukewarm water. Gorgeous, pink,  
too peaky, too fine a colour for her brand of violence,   
she surfaces in July. Spit stains cling to the mirror and  
the rain that rinses away the sins of others   
polishes hers into pearls. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've had a poem labelled 'July' in my files since I was thirteen or thereabouts. Nothing remains of the original, but the feeling is still there...


	3. Angelic

_Angelic_

I

Violence films my lips  
as I search for the words to rip  
the creativity out of you.  
You lie in repose when I return to our room, bruises opening  
like wine on your cheeks. It would be art, surely,  
if I stepped back, but for what, would you flourish? 

II

Motel room. (I did not buy it.)  
Cold cheeseburgers. (I did not eat them.)  
Used books. (I did not read them.)  
Blue fountain pen. (I did not uncap it.)  
New bath bomb. (I did not use it.)  
Glass. (I did not break it.)  
Silence. (I did not start it.)  
Vicious. (I did not—) 

III

I did not  
talk to him for a year. It was 

easy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It took me over a year to finalise that first stanza. The next two - mere minutes. Such is life.


	4. Asymmetry

_Asymmetry_

He told me,  
 _we’re built different._  
He told me,  
it’s the lesser side of pleasure people like us look for  
can’t turn down. In every organ but the heart we  
bloom.

I told him,  
_your honesty will hurt you._  
I told him,  
I’d like to see it. 

He told me, you’re a nihilist  
and you're miserable for it. I said he was wrong;  
I said I was a masochist selfish enough to know that   
desire is the only truth worth following.  
I said I was the kind of person who thrived off being loved  
and not being loved.  
_I said he liked it._

I told him,  
I don’t love you because it’s a choice  
but neither can I resign you to a word like fate.  
I told him,  
it’s not the same for you. It’s what I like about you. 

In the end  
I broke his car. It was an accident.  
He left me for a cross-country road trip with his father.  
He didn’t break anything of mine. It wasn’t an accident.  
I left him for another country.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still not sure how I feel about this one. The third stanza gave me fits; it's been reworked and revised at least four times now.


	5. Texas Spring, Photographed

__

_Bystander_

I

He drove me out

(The allowance for checked baggage is  
fifty kilograms.  
All that baggage; what are you _doing_ with it.  
Well—I’m certainly not having it flown over an entire fucking ocean  
(romance  
is dead)  
to throw it out, am I now.)

to the airport. 

Survived by neither reputation nor rumour. 

II

Cast in the name of god

(Peter!  
he cried.  
—Deny me at the crucifix and I will see you on your own.  
The Romans will lay low  
what faith alone could not.) 

ye not guilty. 

I see your silence for the denial that it isn’t,  
your sin  
stretched so thin. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally the first chapter in this collection. I moved it here because it is better understood after _Asymmetry_.


	6. Lassitude

_Lassitude_

I

In my absence 

(Nothing like fire, fuel to heat to light to ash,  
nothing like water, stone to stones to stone.  
This is death made natural, flesh to pressure to time to oil;  
an easy, ungraceful denial of life overbright.) 

the sun shines hotter. 

II

In my dreams 

...I’m driving down I-40, guard rails whistling,  
wind whipping my hair into fire, _fire_ ;  
I’ve got the forests screaming,  
the mountains, they say, run for the mountains...

I'm gone. 

III 

In your eyes 

(Suicide?—no, too vulgar. This isn’t the theatre,  
questions asked here don’t have answers  
when no one is asking them. Pathetic or pathetic  
actor?—a grimace, a smile. Confused laughter  
your ovation. To the initiated, a message in binary.) 

I exist  
wrongly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spot the Ingmar Bergman!


	7. Unfinished, Unwritten

_Unfinished, Unwritten_

A restaurant, back door propped open—  
cramped stone walls, a cart, cool white lights and humid weather—

It was abrupt even when  
I knew it was coming. 

The clouds clung high to the stars and  
awkwardly,  
we stared at anything but each other.  
The puff-puff-pass that had become our language  
had left us looking at 

“The end of an era,” you finally said. 

—It wasn’t supposed to be so undefined. 

In another age, in another life,  
if you weren’t so tired,  
if I weren’t so afraid—

I might’ve needed you to be happy  
but I don’t need to be happy.

“Oh, hey. Are you guys— oh. Never mind! I was just going to lock the doors. I’ll let you two—”

“No, no! We’re coming in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can never decide if I like how straightforward this is. I think that must be proof of how much I still have to improve before I can consider myself a poet, rather than as a writer of poems.


	8. Charmed

__

_Charmed_

I

There is neither pain nor pleasure  
when all it seems I am left with 

is skin. After all, there is no painting  
to be had if there is only water for ink. 

II

I wonder if snakes grieve for the skins  
they shed; what they could’ve been, 

had I held on tighter. If in my arms  
they sum up to a weight greater 

than what I have left of me, then  
am I allowed to grieve for myself

when breath takes me still? When I could yet  
slip on my clothing discarded and say, I 

am recovered; I am whole. I am a person  
who wants to be alive, I am happy. 

III 

However it seems even a liar  
must adhere to certain truths. 

Some people die before they’re dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the midst of a particularly apathetic episode of apathy.


	9. Marlboro God

_Marlboro God_

When she closes her eyes it feels like coming home.

When she closes her eyes—

(If this is her first vice, then her second must be that she  
lets herself be swallowed by it.

The feel of the hold and the feel of the curl;  
the feel of breathing like she means it, 

like she means it…

…she’s a sinner, she’s a sinner.)

It feels like coming home—

Apathy is a kind of atrophy too. 

When she closes her eyes  
and inhales,

(She has no psychological muscle,  
only an endless tolerance for pain.  
She discovered this when someone at her old job  
tried to teach her how to spiralize a zucchini.)

the emotion is tangible enough that she thinks she could  
snatch it out of the air and

there it’d be, spasming in her fingers like a flower bud 

on the cusp of blooming. 

She never learned how to spiralize that zucchini.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Smoking causes cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung diseases, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis. Smoking also increases risk for tuberculosis, certain eye diseases, and problems of the immune system, including rheumatoid arthritis. —CDC, _Smoking and Tobacco Use_


End file.
